AFAICT, and AFAIK from reading Amtrak's public statements on the issue, all single-level (including long-distance) trains now have the official Nomad Digital-supported AmtrakConnect wifi.
Additionally, it seems they're working on getting it installed on the Superliner LD fleet. The car I'm sitting in now on the CL has an AmtrakConnect network showing. However, when I connect to it, I do not receive an IP address (only a self-assigned one). I suspect the access point does not have anything to talk to upstream (either the train is missing the gateway router or there's a break in the chain (I'm in the last coach) and it's unable to talk to the gateway.
I had wi-fi in the sleeper on the crescent last week, not bad. remember, it is not scaled for streaming video entertainment.....
They have some system in place where it boots you off if you are using too much bandwidth, for obvious reasons.
I don't think that's correct. I am about as bandwidth-intensive of a user as anyone is (short of torrenting or anything like that). I have never been booted off of Amtrak's wifi. The system Amtrak uses, installed and managed by Nomad Digital, does extensive packet shaping to prevent any one user from hogging all the bandwidth. On Amfleet cars, it limits each user to 768kbps downstream; on Acela, it limits each user to about 3mbps (based on my testing).
The Nomad Digital system is pretty impressive: it successfully manages an entire trainload of users and balances that load over four carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon, where available) using eight modem cards/radios.
On the other hand, though, frankly, 768kbps is too slow for the modern web, and it can be difficult to load even image-rich sites (even newspaper articles) over that connection, much less Google Maps (or, of course, Netflix or YouTube). That said, 300 passengers can consume a
lot of data, and the system should spread those limits fairly. I just think that it should be possible to allow users to burst to more than 768kbps if there's headroom in the uplink, which there almost certainly is most of the time or on an empty train.
The other reports earlier in this thread about SCAs giving users passwords are just a temporary band-aid fix that Amtrak is implementing, whereby they distribute Verizon MiFi devices to some crewmembers (for some sleepers) or semi-permanently attach them to specific cars (Superliner business class and Pacific Parlour Cars). The range and capacity of these is limited (it'd be tough to get a good wifi signal on the opposite end of a car from where the device sits, and the Jetpack devices that Amtrak is using only supports up to 15 concurrent devices). The permanently-installed Nomad Digital systems are much more robust, albeit also capped to much slower per-user speeds (even if they theoretically have a potential backhaul capacity of over a gigabit per second per trainset in some areas, with a more practical capacity of about 80-120mbps per trainset in urban areas and about half that in rural areas [where Sprint and T-Mobile lack coverage], falling to ~10mbps per trainset in very rural [non-4G LTE] areas).
Not to mention I'll also turn my phone off so no one can bug me.. That's the best part. Being "off the grid" for a bit.
